Free GM Resource: Printable Heroes

This week's Free GM Resource is an awesome collection of  digital miniatures featured at the Printable Heroes Tumbler.

Of course I like the minis themselves, but I also appreciate that the artist is using Google Drive and Patreon to distribute the minis. I won't link directly to the Google Drive folder where the minis are (You'll have to click through the Tumbler yourself), but the Patreon link is no problem.

One of the things I like is that there are only 2 Patreon levels: $1 or $2 a month.

These minis are designed to be printed out, but I'll probably use them as digital tokens myself. You should really go check out all of the Printable Heroes!

Frugal GM Review: Common Places #13 from The Forge Studios

When I go looking for something to review I'm not always certain what draws me to a particular item. Sometimes it is the idea, sometimes I just want to see how somebody else does something, and sometimes I just "get a feeling".

I've been a bit of a fan of The Forge Studios stuff for a while, even if I haven't really used any of it yet. I liked the idea behind the "Common Places" series and wanted to check one out, but I think I settled on Common Places #13 because I've seen this building before.

The whole idea behind this series is just a small booklet of maps of a specific place that can be used as a one-shot for a GM. Common Places #13 gives the GM the "Library of Lost Leafs", which can be dropped just about in any city, but I'll get back to that.

The download is a 16 page PDF that comes in at almost 16 MB. That is pretty hefty size for only 16 pages and something tells me it could have been optimized a bit better. The cover is in color while the rest of the A4 sized pages are black & white. If I had to guess I'd say the whole PDF was rendered in color......just those colors were black & white. The PDF is secured so you can't tinker with it, but that isn't too terrible of an issue. I will say the pages print up nicely.

Although you can easily set the Library of Lost Leafs in any locale, three pages have been devoted to providing a small town. The first city page shows a smaller city map with room for notes, the second a full page map of the city and the third is another full page map of the city with an inset showing where the library is.  This felt like one page too many to me. I realize getting the page count to 16 makes it easy for booklet printing, but I'd have preferred some different content. The map with an inset wasn't needed, for two reasons. The 1st is as a GM I'd rather put the Library where I want anyway. The 2nd is that the shape of the building where the Library is allegedly located doesn't match the shape of the Library.....might as well just place it anywhere....

There are two pages showing the same graphic from the cover, one with notes and another with a larger picture of the building. Again, this seemed like an extra page because if the GM wanted to show the players a picture of the building he'd want to show the entire building, not just the part shown on the cover....and he could just show the players the cover then.

The rest of the pages are maps of the building and I don't want to post any spoilers. I did note though that there was some inconsistency when it came to marking out the grids and among the maps there is a "ground floor" and a "1st floor" instead of a "ground floor" and a "2nd floor".

Even though there were some minor issues with this product I do like it quite a bit. As a GM I could easily see using Common Places #13 not only as a whole, but in parts. I could grab the city map to use by itself, and the basement of the building map could easily be used apart from the the building itself.

Personally I hate trying to draw decent city maps so for me this download was worth the price for that one page, but as usual YMMV. I think I'd take a close look at the rest of the series when I needed to drop something into my game.

About This Week's Frugal GM Review...

This week's review will be a day late due to unforeseen complications with Thanksgiving.

Sandbox Gaming Question: How Much Do You Need to Start?

In a chat last week a question came up about how much does a GM have to have pre-planned at the onset of an open, or "sandbox" campaign.

There were several responses, but almost all of them involved using the PC's ability to travel as a factor. Most of the GM's agreed on having the immediate starting area planned out, it was just the mode of travel that was at issue.

Me, I assume the PCs starting out will not have access to expensive horses and will be on foot. I'll plan out the starting town/city and figure that the next villages will be at most a day's walk away. Larger cities will be no less than three day's walk away so the PCs/NPCs could walk there, spend the day conducting business in the city, and walk back in the span of a week.

All I do at that point is flesh out enough of a skeleton to represent those other villages and the city, and have some road encounters, village encounters, and a few dungeons that I can place wherever the PC's decide to go.

Of course, knowing what your players want and how they are most likely to take your adventure hooks helps a lot. I also recommend the d30 Sandbox Companion as a help.

My open question about this is: "How much pre-planning do you think a GM needs when starting a sandbox campaign?"

Last Bit of d30 Height & Weight Tables now Available

I think I've milked the d30 Height & Weight tables enough......

The remaining races I had left were an assortment of "lesser-used" races from HackMaster 4th & 5th edition:
     * Grel
     * Gnome Titans
     * Sil-Karg
     * Pixie-Kin
     * Half-Ogres
     * Gnomelings

I just couldn't see putting these up as individual races, especially since the Sil-Karg entries were doubled because there was some sexual dimorphism resulting in large differences in height & weight.

What I did was combine the remaining tables into two PDFs, one for English units (FGM031ze) and one for Metric units (FGM031zm).

Free GM Resource: The Terrain Tutor

This week's Free GM Resource is another YouTube channel.

The Terrain Tutor has about a bazillion videos and not all of them are ones I want to sit through, but there are a lot of great tips, tricks, and how-to videos well worth your time.

I particularly enjoy these playlists:
Back 2 Basics for Wargames Terrain and Scenery Builders
How to make simple wargaming hills
Quick and Simple Tips

There are several more playlists to watch as well.

Frugal GM Review: A Guide to Hallowfest

I was link-hopping recently and came across this "Halloween" themed Pay-What-You-Want supplement called A Guide to Hallowfest. It was published by Sundered Blade Games.

I had never heard of Sundered Blade Games, but a quick check of their publisher's page revealed that they only have a few titles out and almost all of them are PWYW. They also have one adventure for sale that is written for two systems.

Really not bad for a start-up from earlier this year.

A Guide to Hallowfest is an 18 page black & white PDF in a Zine (5.5" x 8.5") format that  comes in under 4 MB. The PDF is secured, but I don't really see the need to extract pages or reassemble the PDF.

There is a little bit of information on what appears to be a custom game world, but at best it is a couple of sentences and this adventure could be put anywhere in an existing campaign. What this supplement is really about is a small dungeon crawl. The creatures and items listed in the beginning are used in the adventure.

Normally I'd rather have the adventure written 1st and then have a listing/entry for the monsters and items. When I was reading A Guide to Hallowfest the fact it started out with the monsters and then the items before going into the adventure.....didn't really bother me any. The art in the PDF was a  little "cutesy", but not distracting. One monster didn't have a picture but instead some text reading "Image not approved for all audiences". That felt like a bit of a cop-out.

This bit of text and the cover are my only criticisms. I'd have preferred a white cover instead of an orange one so I could print this out for use. An inclusion of a printer-friendly cover would have bumped up the page count to 20 and if they enlarged some of the fine print (like the legal stuff) and/or included a title page they could have gotten the page count to 22. This would allow the end-user to print pages 2-21 (a 20 page spread) in a booklet format and have a nice, full printed product.

This is a minor consideration though and not something I care enough about to drop my rating any. Overall I did enjoy this adventure and think A Guide to Hallowfest would be a fun adventure to run my players through.

Free Map055: A Set of Caverns

I've just posted Free Map055 ocer at my Patreon page. This is a small set of two caverns that are not connected.

When I make these caverns, unless I'm using them for a specific adventure, I usually do not put in things like entrances and features, leaving those decisions up to the GM.

I have been putting in some grids, but I haven't specified the distance. The GM could make them 5' or 5 yards/meters for all I care.

Click on this link or on the graphic below to go straight to the pertinent Patreon post.